Privacy

Norberto Andrade is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow scholar at UC Berkeley School of Law, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (BCLT), and a Fellow at the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law (HiiL, The Netherlands). He has worked as a Scientific Officer at the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, and as a legal expert in the field of telecommunications at the Portuguese Regulatory Authority for Communications (ANACOM).

Dr. Asaro is Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at the New School in New York City. He is the co-founder of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, and has written on lethal robotics from the perspective of just war theory and human rights. Dr. Asaro's research also examines agency and autonomy, liability and punishment, and privacy and surveillance as it applies to consumer robots, industrial automation, smart buildings, aerial drones and autonomous vehicles.

Charles Belle is the founder and Executive Director of Startup Policy Lab, a new nonprofit think tank dedicated to connecting policymakers and the startup community. Examining public policy at the nexus of startups and technology, Charles' research is currently focused on privacy and how to support local government open data initiatives while simultaneously protecting citizen privacy.

Ryan Calo is an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law and a former research director at CIS. A nationally recognized expert in law and emerging technology, Ryan's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Wired Magazine, and other news outlets. Ryan serves on several advisory committees, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Future of Privacy Forum.

Our recent research on Google’s circumvention of the Safari cookie blocking feature has led to some confusion, in part owing to the company’s statement in response (reproduced in its entiretybelow). This post is an attempt to elucidate the central issues. As with the original writeup, I aim for a neutral viewpoint in the interest of establishing a common factual understanding.

Last week, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in United States v. Jones, in which the Justices held that the government's installation of a GPS device on a target's vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle's movements, constituted a Fourth Amendment search. The decision was surprisingly unanimous on this point, though concurring opinions by Justices Sotomayor and Alito potentially amplify the significance of the opinion by proposing alternate approaches to the larger problem of ubiquitous surveillance technologies and privacy in public. Given the majority opinion's narrow focus on the attachment of the device to the car, the larger issue of privacy in public remains unsettled.

Othershavedoneanexemplaryjobofcommentingonthedecision. The dominant themes arising from the decision and analysis of the decision seem to be the (re?)injection of the concept of trespass into Fourth Amendment doctrine, signs of potential withering of the third party doctrine, and recognition that Fourth Amendment and privacy doctrine will soon enough be useless if they do not adequately protect against ever-evolving surveillance methods and technologies.

I'd like to focus on an aspect of the decision that has not shown up much in the analysis of the case, likely because it was never explicitly mentioned in the text. Although the word obscurity does not appear anywhere in United States v. Jones, I think the decision, particularly Justice Sotomayor's concurring opinion, supports the idea that the obscurity of our personal information is worth protecting.

Most people believe that privacy and free speech are always at odds. People all over the world have struggled with how to reconcile the problems of media gossip with our commitment to free and open public debate for over a century. The rise of the Internet has made this problem more urgent. We live in an age of corporate and government surveillance of our lives. And our free speech culture has created an anything-goes environment on the web, where offensive and hurtful speech about others is rife.

During the course of a long-distance relationship, Holly Jacobs shared sexually explicit photos and videos with her ex-boyfriend. She trusted him to keep them private. After they broke up, Jacobs received an anonymous email with a link and a warning that “Someone is trying to make life very difficult for you.” When she clicked on the link, she discovered the nude images that she’d shared with her ex on a site hosting revenge porn—compromising photos, often put up by exes after a breakup, without the subject’s consent.

Excited teenagers – in other words normal teenagers – have never been famous for consistently wise decisions, nor should they be. Trial and error is a critical part of growing up.

But the emergence and widespread uptake of social media has further complicated the ability of teenagers to put past issues behind them. What used to remain only in fading memories increasingly lingers in code on computer servers in the cloud.

“Big data” can be defined as a problem-solving philosophy that leverages massive datasets and algorithmic analysis to extract “hidden information and surprising correlations.” Not only does big data pose a threat to traditional notions of privacy, but it also compromises socially shared information. This point remains underappreciated because our so-called public disclosures are not nearly as public as courts and policymakers have argued—at least, not yet. That is subject to change once big data becomes user friendly.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wanted to dramatize how hard GPS surveillance would be for our nation’s founders to envision. It would take a “very tiny constable,” he noted in concurrence with the majority in United States v. Jones, “with incredible fortitude and patience” to stow away on a stage coach and monitor its owner’s movements.

"Jane" allowed her ex-boyfriend to take her naked photograph because, he assured her, it would be for his eyes only. After their breakup, the man betrayed her trust.

On the revenge porn site UGotPosted, he uploaded her naked photo and contact information. Jane received calls, e-mails, and Facebook friend requests from hundreds of strangers, many of whom wanted sex.

Copyright law is facing its biggest challenge yet as it copes with technological development and an increasingly global information market. The advent of peer-to-peer networks has multiplied the threat to the peaceful enjoyment of copyrights and made any user a potential infringer. Nonetheless, copyright holders, in targeting those users, have greatly impinged on the users' fundamental rights, in particular the right to privacy.

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"If you could just post something and change a relationship, you could just go to Banana Republic and say 'Oh, is your return policy 30 days? Well my return policy is 60 days, so I'll see you then,'" says Calo.

Even our traditional definition of "privacy" may no longer apply in a world of omnipresent cameras and recorders, according to Woodrow Hartzog, assistant professor at Samford University's Cumberland School of Law, where he writes on privacy and human engagement with electronics. "Privacy has really ceased to be helpful as a term to guide policy in the United States," he says, "because privacy means so many different things to so many different people.

Facebook has defended its new in-store tracking partnership with Datalogix, which gives Facebook access to our offline shopping habits via our rewards cards, by explaining that it doesn't violate any Federal Trade Commission regulations. Facebook says it will anonymize the data and is only interested in showing advertisers how their ads are converting to new sales. But it led us to ask what exactly the FTC does protect in the data collection department.

“Facebook’s insistence that it will ‘not be using this data for enforcement actions’ puts the company and users in a difficult position,” says law professor Woodrow Hartzog. “If Facebook is openly admitting that it is not going to enforce its own policies when it knows these policies have been violated, how should users gauge the importance of these terms? Alternatively, if Facebook does plan to enforce its ‘real names’ policy, is it really going to be willfully ignorant of this pile of data that could help Facebook pinpoint which users are violating its agreement?

Is there any indication of cost effectiveness and / or life preservation by the use of drone strikes?

Ryan Calo: It turns out that the bigger military drones used to deploy missiles are expensive; one government report suggested that the costs associated with owning and maintaining certain drones were comparable to manned aircraft. But they do lower the risks to American soldiers and, some say, to foreign citizens (by lowering collateral damage). Smaller scout planes like the Raven are much less expensive and, by most accounts, very useful.

"E-mail and its eventual successors are simply too important to be governed by inconsistent and confusing standards," wrote Woodrow Hartzog, a professor at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University, in an e-mail sent to Ars. "While more comprehensive and adaptable privacy protections for electronic communications are needed, I imagine dramatic improvement in the electronic surveillance regime will be politically and logistically challenging."

To cap off a summer of devastating corporate data breaches, hackers yesterday posted online what might be the crown jewel of 2012 data dumps: 1 million identification numbers for Apple iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch's, all purportedly stolen from the FBI.

CIS Affiliate Scholar Ryan Calo is quoted in this All Things Considered piece on Apple's decision to block a drone-tracking app due to objectionable content. As Ryan explains, Apple can select the apps it sells, but he adds that "in these kinds of borderline examples, they ought to be finding in favor of free speech, just as good corporate citizens setting an example worldwide."

"These documents are illustrative of why individuals often feel so helpless with information that is shared with others or in public—it is very difficult for us to police the use of our information ‘downstream,’" wrote Woodrow Hartzog, a law professor at Samford University, in an e-mail sent to Ars.

Solutions to many pressing economic and societal challenges lie in better understanding data. New tools for analyzing disparate information sets, called Big Data, have revolutionized our ability to find signals amongst the noise. Big Data techniques hold promise for breakthroughs ranging from better health care, a cleaner environment, safer cities, and more effective marketing. Yet, privacy advocates are concerned that the same advances will upend the power relationships between government, business and individuals, and lead to prosecutorial abuse, racial or other profiling, discrimination, redlining, overcriminalization, and other restricted freedoms.

People rarely read privacy policies, but they're important. So let's make it easier for users to understand the most meaningful things a website does with their data. To accomplish this Disconnect is hosting a project to crowd-source -- think Wikipedia -- turning websites' privacy policies into a set of Creative Commons licensed privacy icons. The project also will publicly launch with an API so that any developer can build tools using the icons and crowd-sourced data. Here's a link to the current iteration of the project and a rudimentary Firefox add-on we created for the hackathon:

Technology Reporter Steven Henn leads a conversation on new innovations in face recognition technology and the legal & ethical challenges they raise with two leading privacy experts: University of Washington Law's Ryan Calo and Carnegie Mellon University's Alessandro Acquisti

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Why is it bad when the government or companies monitor our reading or web-surfing? We have intuitions that this kind of surveillance is bad, but have failed to explain why digital monitoring in an age of terror and innovation is really a problem. In Intellectual Privacy, Neil Richards offers a new way of thinking about monitoring of our thinking, reading, and communications, one that ensures that our ideas and values keep pace with our technologies.

In the realm of big data, privacy is a significant, and often controversial, issue. In this clip, Jennifer Granick takes on the alleged trade-off between “privacy versus security,” and proposes an alternate framing. She is the Director of Civil Liberties at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School.

This video is a preview of Worldview Stanford's unique online and on-campus course, Behind and Beyond Big Data. We are currently accepting applications for the course. Learn more and apply here: worldview.stanford.edu/course/behind-and-beyond-big-data

Peninsula Peace & Justice Center presents a conversation with Robert Scheer, author and journalist, and Aleecia McDonald, fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, hosted by Paul George, Director of PPJC. Scheer is the author of "They Know Everything About You, How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy."

CIS Affiliate Scholar David Levine interviews Julia Lane of the American Institutes for Research and Prof. Victoria Stodden of the iSchool at Illinois, co-editors of Privacy, Big Data, and the Public Good: Frameworks for Engagement.

Marc Rotenberg is President and Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, DC, and a former counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. EPIC focuses public attention on emerging privacy and civil liberties issues.

The 1st international conference on Internet Science was held between 9 and 11 April, 2013, in Brussels, under the aegis of the European Commission, by the EINS project, the FP7 European Network of Excellence in Internet Science, with the support of KVAB.

In this video from Shmoocon 2013, Professor Orin Kerr and Marcia Hofmann from EFF discuss several recent prosecutions brought under the Act, including cases against Aaron Swartz and Andrew Auernheimer.